All posts filed under: Yemen

Almost three years have passed since Saudi Arabia announced it was intervening militarily, with its allies, in Yemen, to remove the Houthis (officially called Ansar Allah) from power after they had taken over the capital. Western analysts saw it as a bold move from recently-empowered (deputy) crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS), weapons manufacturers and their political representatives were delighted. But what had been predicted as a swift military operation has turned into a humiliating stalemate. Unable to impose its will by force, Saudi Arabia and its bold prince have resorted to war crimes and collective punishment, imposing a humanitarian catastrophe on the Yemeni people.

by Adrian Rossi, Sanaa, Yemen, October 2, 2017 I will start this by saying I’m not a very sentimental person. Perhaps it has to do with not having reached a certain emotional maturity yet in order to feel at ease with being publicly vulnerable, so this post will be a bit of that in the hope that I will be able to offer all of you, a glimpse into the horrors Yemenis experience on a daily basis, at what is an emotional and psychological level. I lost my parents at age 7 while in Angola. Had to witness them being shot in the head, then set on fire in what was a mass grave. Their deaths had been instantaneous, so their eyes had stayed open. Watching them at what was still a tender age, I remember thinking to myself maybe they were still alive and could feel the pain. Most of it is a blur that comes every now and then. What I do remember best is the desperate instinct to jump in there after …

by Denis Churilov ISIS/Daesh is likely to be defeated in Syria and Iraq very soon. But will it bring peace to the region? No. There are many potential local conflicts that can break out in the nearest future. Some of them are already going on, some of them are in the dormant state, waiting to be triggered. Other conflicts might be created spontaneously out of thin air. Let’s try to predict the upcoming conflicts in the Middle East. The following list contains the worst case scenarios that are not mutually exclusive and can, in fact, facilitate one another in a domino effect style: A civil war in Iraq between Kurdish Erbil and Iranian-backed Baghdad government. We have already seen reports on the clashes between Peshmerga forces and the Shia militias in 2016. The recent developments with the referendum may soon exacerbate the situation, especially considering that ISIS has been seriously weakened and now can’t serve as a unifying common threat factor. Kurds in Turkey. The clashes between various Kurdish militants and Erdogan’s government have been …

by Niles Niemuth , 27 June 2017, WSWS The United States and United Arab Emirates (UAE), in coordination with Yemeni proxy forces, are operating a network of torture chambers in the war-torn country into which hundreds of men have been disappeared. As revealed by an Associated Press (AP) report published last week, the US and UAE have established a network of at least 18 secret prisons in Yemen used for torturing and interrogating men who are suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The brutal torture regime began under the Obama administration and continues under President Donald Trump. According to the AP report, the US operates with a mostly hands-off approach in which it provides lists of names of men to be detained and then provides the torturers with lists of questions to be asked to detainees. After tormenting and interrogating detainees, the UAE transmits transcripts and videos of confessions to US officials. However, a Yemeni officer reported to the AP that he witnessed at least two detainees brought to ships …

Four days ago, after reports that Saudi Arabia had bombed a funeral in Yemen killing 140 mourners, America announced it would “review its support” for the Saudi-led coalition. Three days ago the USS Mason, an American destroyer in the patrolling the Red Sea, was apparently fired upon from Yemen. It has gone unquestioned in the Western MSM that the Houthis were behind this attack, despite strong denials from the Houthis themselves.

from Media Lens The ‘mainstream’ Western media is, almost by definition, the last place to consult for honest reporting of Western crimes. Consider the appalling case of Yemen which is consumed by war and an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Since March 2015, a ‘coalition’ of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and France, has been dropping bombs on neighbouring Yemen. The scale of the bombing is indicated in a recent article by Felicity Arbuthnot – in one year, 330,000 homes, 648 mosques, 630 schools and institutes, and 250 health facilities were destroyed or damaged. The stated aim of Saudi Arabia’s devastating assault on Yemen is to reinstate the Yemeni president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and to hold back Houthi rebels who are allied with the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. The Saudis assert that the Houthis, who control Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, are ‘proxies’ for Iran: always a convenient propaganda claim to elicit Western backing and ‘justify’ intervention. Philip Hammond, who was UK defence secretary when the Saudi bombing began in …

by Vaska As FortRuss reported on January 6, the Saudi Air Force has bombed a centre for the blind in the Yemeni capital Sana’a, leaving at least 3 dead. The raid took place at night, while the residents of the centre were asleep. Exact information on the number of casualties is still not available. “These blind children are made to be the target of airstrikes? Where are the NGO’s? Where is the UN?” [….] It should be noted that Saudi Arabia have committed dozens of war crimes on the territory of Yemen. For example, only recently Saudi warplanes have attacked schools, hospitals, roads where there were no military targets, factory of Coca-Cola, a dairy farm, and 2 industrial enterprises. So far, there’s been a complete lack of reaction on the part of the EU, the individual European countries themselves, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, as well as international human rights organizations and the UN itself. Illustrations courtesy of FortRuss

from Aletho News Turns out the United States and the Islamic State, ISIS, are de facto allies of Saudi Arabia and its alliance of dictator states, all bent on exterminating Yemeni Houthis and pretty much any other Yemeni in the neighborhood. This Yemenicide started in earnest in March 2015. After years of US drone strikes proved too slow and ineffective at wiping out people in the poorest country in the Arab world, it was time to expand the arsenal of war crimes. Rarely, in discussions of Yemen, does one hear much about the violations of international law that have reduced the country to its present war-torn and devastated condition. Failing to acknowledge a foreign policy disaster in Yemen, the Obama administration has chosen instead to trash international law by supporting the criminal, aggressive war that Saudi Arabia’s coalition of police states launched on Yemen on March 26. Now, despite more than three months of Saudi-American terror bombing, the Houthis remain in control of northwest Yemen, their tribal homeland, as well as much of the southeast …

from the Corbett Report EDITOR’S NOTE: The following transcript of Episode 295 of The Corbett Report podcast, “Who Is Really Behind ISIS?”, was generously provided by Corbett Report subscriber tezla. For the mp3 audio of the podcast please CLICK HERE, or you can watch the vodcast in the player below: ‘Who is really behind ISIS?’, and this is an interesting question for, I think, most of the people on the globe right now because of course ISIS is the ostensible reason behind the airstrikes we see going on in Syria as we speak, led of course by the United States but including a coalition of allies, and a seemingly expanding coalition, with rhetoric heating up in just about every Western nation on the planet as the fear-mongers go into absolute overdrive about this shadowy terror group on the other side of the planet that most people in the world, or at least most people in the western world, hadn’t heard of at all just a few months ago but now is the big boogeyman behind …

by Anatoly Karlin at the Unz Review It has the world’s highest number of guns per unit of GDP, a population fast outgrowing the land’s carrying capacity, is riven by ethnic and religious divisions, and its cities look something like the Counter-Strike map de_dust. Otherwise, I don’t know much about Yemen. So I will not wax knowledgeable about it except insofar as the incipient intervention there allows me to make a couple wider points on the hypocrisy of international relations. The first point was eloquently argued by my friend Alexander Mercouris at Sputnik earlier this morning. I will liberally paraphrase henceforth (I would otherwise quote outright, but I wish to add in some additional details as I go). President Hadi was elected Yemen’s President in 2012 as the sole candidate with 99.8% of the vote, in what Hillary Clinton said was “another important step forward in their democratic transition process.” But early this year he was unseated and fled to the souther port city of Aden, declaring his overthrow illegal, and since then he has …

From RT Dozens of unidentified foreign troops reported disembarking in the port of Aden turned out to be Chinese soldiers maintaining security as an unknown party opened fire on a vessel evacuating foreign citizens, a Yemeni official told Sputnik. He added that Chinese soldiers have already left the port, though reportedly they did not manage to take with them all the people intended to evacuate, not all of the Chinese nationals. The city of Aden has turned into battlefield as violent street-to-street fighting between advancing Houthi rebels and pro-president troops making a stand. The data from medics and military suggest that up to 44 people have been killed in street clashes, AFP reports. Earlier member of the Houthi political council Daifullah Shami told Sputnik that the foreign troops in Aden disembarked from Saudi and Egyptian vessels. “The number of troopers who landed in the Yemen port of Aden is unknown, but we are talking about dozens. They were covered by several airplanes. They disembarked from Saudi and Egyptian ships,” said a member of Ansar Allah …

The double standards of the US State Department knows no bounds… Jen is psaking again about the legitimacy and illegitimacy of various heads of state. Difficult for anyone to take this dysfunctional foreign policy at all seriously anymore….USA is supporting the bombing of Yemen by Saudis “because there was an illegal coup against elected president..” But in Syria USA supports, trains and equips bearded jihadi terrorists which want to overthrown democratically elected president Assad.

Houthi dominance is hardly dangerous, but Riyadh’s ambitions may destabilize the peninsula By Graham E. Fuller, former Vice Chairman, CIA National Intelligence Council Yemen, like Afghanistan, has a long reputation as a quagmire for foreign invaders. Saudi Arabia could break its teeth there if the U.S. does not constrain it. Astonishingly, Yemeni events have now conspired to bring about the supposed intervention of some 10 regional powers in one of the most hyped events in the Arabian Peninsula of recent times. Most of this proxy war makes little sense: the threats emanating from Yemen are distorted and exaggerated, the stakes are actually relatively low (except for Yemenis), any imposed settlement is highly elusive, and the costs to those engaged may be high. For the U.S., it can be once again something of a lose-lose situation, where the enemy of my enemy is often also my enemy. There are fourth myths about Yemen that need to be sorted out: The first myth is that this war represents yet a new front on a massive regional Sunni-Shiite …

This war has raged for years and may last for decades “Local sources confirm that Saudi Arabia continued to launch airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Jebel al-Dukhan area on the Saudi-Yemeni border, despite ROYG statements to the contrary… While Saudi airstrikes may succeed in driving the Houthis from some of their border strongholds, they are unlikely to have much impact on the Sa’ada war without an accompanying ground invasion.” “In response to Houthi incursions into Saudi territory and a November 2 Houthi attack on Saudi border guards, Saudi Arabia continued to launch airstrikes against Houthi rebels in the Jebel al-Dukhan area on the Saudi-Yemeni border, local sources told PolOffs in early November. In contradiction to AP reports that Saudi Arabia regained control of contested Jebel al-Dukhan on November 8, the Houthis denied that the Saudis had taken the mountain, claiming they were still in control. Also on November 8, a ROYG aircraft crashed in Razih district (which borders Saudi Arabia to the north of Malahit); the Houthis took credit for downing it, while the ROYG …

Obviously, for some probably crazy reason (maybe numerology, which is allegedly popular with the IMF’s Christine Lagarde), the “war party” have decided now is the time for the final showdown. No more pussyfooting around with wimpy things like diplomacy and international law. Just get in there and start mixing it up, whether it be Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, Syria, or Yemen, and anyone who doesn’t like it can just suck on America’s Exceptionalism. If anyone doubted the US is going for broke on a global scale the Saudi attack on Yemen makes it impossible to do so any longer. Washington may claim it’s a bystander in this conflict, but that’s just a routine Washington lie. The US wants total control of the Middle East. The recent Houthi uprising in Yemen threatens that control and therefore has to be crushed. Enter the Saudis and other US vassals, willing as always to allow Washington to wear the fig leaf of deniability. It’s also, of course, a bid by the “war party” to derail the encroaching international rapprochement …

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